In the field of networking and reliable data transport, as for example in case of TCP, bursty packet drops occur during a data transmission. A bursty packet drop might occur due to a disturbance on the network or different packet run times due to different paths via the network. Especially in high speed networks like in 10 Gb Ethernet, the handling of lost and retransmitted packets can introduce a disproportionate decrease of the net data rate. In the field of, e.g., high speed video transmission, a user experiences visible disruption when bursty packet drops occur and the CPU is not fast enough to recover the sequential packets in time. Data packets sent via the network are identified by subsequently increasing sequence numbers so that it is possible for a receiver to determine, whether or not a packet is missing. In case the receiver successfully receives a packet, it sends to the sender an acknowledge message comprising the sequence number of that successfully received packet.
A reliable transport protocol usually retransmits a data packet that a receiver was not able to receive and thus was not acknowledged. In order to manage data packets that are retransmitted, a receiver in the network monitors sequence numbers and stores missing sequence numbers within an internal data structure, hereinafter called packet administration map. For performance reasons the received packets are usually subsequently stored in a receive buffer, sorted according to their sequence numbers. The packet administration map is used to map the retransmitted packets by means of the sequence number to corresponding receive buffer addresses. When a missing packet arrives at the receiver, the receiver needs to update the packet administration map in order to track the progress of the data reception. This map administration overhead needs to be carried out more often when there are numerous transmission errors, that is, when the retransmission rate increases. Depending on the used transport protocol, the overall sending data rate can also be increased, which in total could consume a significant amount of processing power.
In the document WO 01/76189 A2 a data sequencing algorithm using several timers is disclosed.
In the document US 2007/0053303 A1 a means of measuring or estimating the subjective or perceptual quality of decoded audio, voice or video data received over a network is described.